Database Admins! Red Gate Wants To Send One Of You INTO SPACE

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Rarely do we promote a company’s marketing campaign here on TechCrunch, but then again, this is a contest with one hell of a prize. If you’re a database administrator, you better pay close attention to the following. British software company Red Gate is rewarding one lucky SOB DBA (no matter if he or she works at a bank, Internet startup or a soda distributor) with a seat on a commercial flight into space, courtesy of Space Adventures.

Signing up or tweeting something hilarious ain’t going to cut it, though. From the press release:

But first, DBAs must unravel a Gordian knot of a plot involving morphing Martians, pets in peril, alien body parts and abduction of one of their own – all unfolding in a five-week series of snazzy (and frankly surreal) 60s-style space-noir B-movies.

Sounds like a lot of work, I know, but again, the prize is A FLIGHT INTO F’ING SPACE here.

Fifteen finalists will be selected from those who provide the best answers to quizzes within the videos cited above, and the ripest tweets from dataspace. The winning DBA will be elected by popular vote.

So why is Red Gate doing this for database administrators? Copy. Paste.

Why a DBA? Because they’re the most important people you’ve never heard of. The world is not kept spinning on its course by politicians or financiers. It’s the humble DBA who makes it happen – the Master of Data who enables medical records to be summoned in the blink of an eye, keeps transport running smoothly, manages the data beneath the electrical grid for billions of people and provides instant access to news, music, phone calls, money and an endless supply of entertainment.

They made me feel bad about my career choice there for a second. Only for a second, though.

So what’s the actual prize?

A “cat’s whisker” above the Kármán line – at 62 miles, the official boundary of space – into pitch black, gazing back on the impossibly cool view of planet earth, the view that astronaut Edgar Mitchell called “a glimpse of divinity.”

Fuck it, I’m pretending to be a database administrator.

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CrunchBase

OverviewFounded in 1999, Red Gate Software produces ingeniously simple tools used by more than 500,000 IT professionals worldwide. The company currently specializes in SQL Server and .NET tools. Red Gate has been chosen as one of The Sunday Times (UK) 100 best small companies to work for in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.